More than just a photo album, adoption lifebooks help adopted kids and their families record important details of the child’s birth, birth family, adoption journey and also their experiences in the adoptive family. Pictures and mementos are crucial to an interesting lifebook, but even more important is the journaling that outlines the feelings, thoughts and memories of each experience. By scrapbooking an adopted child’s lifebook, parents can include details that traditional baby books do not include and they can individualize the scrapbook to the child’s specific story.
Creative Memories, a major scrapbooking supplier, suggests considering these points when planning a child’s lifebook.
- How much information and how many photos do you have?
- How old was your child when he/she was adopted?
- How much do you want your child or others to know?
- Did the adoption process require domestic or overseas travel?
Answering these questions will help set the tone of the lifebook and also generate scrapbook page ideas.
Lifebook Page Ideas
It is often easier to plan scrapbook pages before beginning the lifebook to minimize duplication of information and also to create a flow to the child’s story.
- The day you were born
- How your parents found out about you
- Waiting for you
- Meeting you
- Your birth family
- Your foster family or orphanage
- The celebration
- Your family tree
- Adoption day
- Visits with your birth family
- Your name
Items to Include in a Lifebook
Aside from photos, a child’s lifebook is also an appropriate place to store adoption trip brochures, e-mails and letters from the birth family and foster family, copies of adoption certificates and anything else that helps paint a more detailed picture of a child’s life. If using the lifebook to record a baby’s first milestones, include calendar pages and photos of these first events. If using the lifebook as a springboard for adoption discussions with the child or others, include more details of the adoption process itself.
Lifebook Journaling Ideas
Photos and mementos are important for illustrating an adopted child’s story, but the main thread of the scrapbook is the journaling. Adopted kids will not likely notice the cute stickers or the colours of the background paper of a page, as much as the story told on that page. No detail is too small to include.
- Dates of events and milestones
- Names of social workers, facilitators and agency officials
- Locations and names of foster families and orphanages
- Weather and news headlines
- Thoughts and feelings about the process
- Comments on facial expressions
- Challenges of the adoption process
- Poetry and quotations about adoption
- Making the decision to adopt
- Foods eaten, sights seen
- Stories about traveling home
- Details of the first days together as a family
The making of a lifebook scrapbook is a wonderful gift to give an adopted child of any age. Ideally, kids should be able to look at it any time they like, so make copies of these treasured memories for safekeeping.
Angela Krueger - As an adoptive parent and PRIDE adoption trainer, Angela uses her insights to help others on their adoption journey.
